LITERARY FICTION
THE MOST SECRET MEMORY OF MEN
by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (Harvill Secker €21, 496pp) THIS marvellous novel is part gripping literary mystery and part disquisition on being a black author in a predominantly white culture — and this Senegalese author knows it’s just as important it should be the former as the latter.
In other words, it’s an unapologetic hymn to the sheer pleasure of reading that hums with literary references and meta-fictional game play.
Our narrator, Diegane, is a Paris-based Senegalese novelist who, after languishing in obscurity for years, becomes the toast of the city following a favourable review.
But amid invitations to appear at festivals, he is mainly concerned with unpicking the enigma behind an all but lost novel, The Labyrinth Of Inhumanity, whose black author, TC Elimane, disappeared without a trace during the 1930s after being accused of plagiarism.
As Diegane embarks on his own labyrinthian journey, so the reader is drawn into a skilfully drawn reconstruction of French literary history in which ideas of authenticity, power, race and fame are wittily deconstructed. Terrific.
CHANGE
by Edouard Louis, translator John Lambert (Harvill Secker €27.50, 288pp) YOU don’t have to have read the French author Edouard Louis’s previous two novels to enjoy his third. Although, as they are all autobiographical, to read them together is to marvel at his seemingly inexhaustible ability to mine every crevice of his personal experience in the name of fiction.
Those first two books testified to the extreme hardship and poverty of France’s disenfranchised white working classes in which he grew up. Now, we find him on the cusp of radical change: studying at a lycee in Amiens and exposed to previously unimaginable new worlds.
There’s his undefinable friendship with Elena, a girl whose privilege and culture seduce him utterly, but there is also Didier, a sexually liberated gay writer. Throughout, Louis strains to shed his old skin in favour of new identities — author, lover, actor, bourgeois — but the process is fraught with shame.
A mesmeric novel that doesn’t so much document change as question the extent to which it’s possible.
NUCLEAR FAMILY
by Kate Davies (Borough Press €19.60, 432pp) THE perils of DNA testing lie at the heart of this deftly wrought, if breezy novel, in which a home kit reveals an inconvenient truth: Tom is not the father of his twin daughters, Alison and Lena.
Their late mother conceived using a sperm donor, news that leaves Alison unfazed, since she and her wife are about to embark on a similar process. But Lena is furious and determined to track down her biological dad.
And then a newly discovered halfbrother gets thrown into the mix, complicating feelings and relationships further still.
The ethical challenges of technology as it encroaches ever deeper into our identities are explored with a decidedly light touch in this enjoyable if somewhat skin-deep slice of commercial fiction — even if the whole thing feels at times a bit too deliberately engineered for book club conversations.